From NPR, this is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam.

In 1950, a three-year-old girl from Tennessee contracted polio.

Within days, Diane O'Dell couldn't walk.

Then she couldn't breathe.

Her life was saved by a miraculous monstrous device, the Iron Lung.

You are listening to the breath of life,

as it is pumped by these tank respirators called Iron Lung.

Over the years, new types of respirators allowed many polio patients to escape the Iron Lung.

Not Diane.

She had a spinal condition that made it her only option.

So she stayed flat on her back and capsulated from the neck down in the long, noisy, cylindrical tube

for 58 years.

In an interview shortly before her death, Diane said people often had the same blunt reaction

about what they would want in her situation.

Most of them said, I'd rather be dead.

I could live there, why I'd rather be dead.

There is always tomorrow.

Diane saw her choice very differently than the people looking in from the outside.

It's one thing to say you would not want to live for 58 years in an Iron Lung.

But that is not the choice that confronted Diane.

The choice was always, do you want to see tomorrow?

Today we look at how one family grappled with the same question.

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